Global emphasis on women's economic empowerment has taken centre stage. The UN is talking about it as are Commonwealth countries and top women execs. Headlines on this goal are set to become more common. What do they signal?
Feminist goals regarding economic power build on a century of analysis regarding women and work around the world. "Economic empowerment" is an idea with long history: from the complexity of women's experiences of sexual, reproductive and labour exploitation for colonial plantation profits to contemporary women's subsistence agriculture or informal economic activities and housework hours remaining uncounted and unvalued. The idea has filtered into decades of focus on micro-finance, small-scale saving, sustainable income opportunities, fair trade and public policies to support work-family balance.
Caribbean women have deep knowledge of the intricacies and challenges of economic empowerment. Our grandmothers were raising families, theirs and sometimes others, while also taking in sewing work, selling cakes and pastelles or marketing their garden produce. Many Caribbean women labour in the informal economy, manage small savings through sou sou systems, and take risks to start their medium-scale businesses. Yet, it's only been in the last decades that women have shattered glass ceilings in middle management. They have yet to do so among top CEOs and in areas like finance.
Caribbean feminists have added an important dimension. For them, economic empowerment should not be reduced to women's entrepreneurial survival and success. In other words, empowerment isn't only how well you do at business nor is business logic the best way to ensure equity, rights, freedoms and a good life.
Rather, economic empowerment is when women, including the poorest among us, can collectively and powerfully influence states' macro-economic policy, and push through legislation and protocols that effectively stop waste and corruption, which ultimately emaciate social sector spending. Have women secured such influence in T&T today? If more women became successful business leaders, would they be more likely to take on these issues?
Economic empowerment is when women's experience of labouring in both the public sphere and private businesses occurs within the context of all the policies that they need. It is when market vendors can shape agricultural trade policy or when domestic workers can get the government to ratify International Labour Organisation Convention 189, which enshrines their right to decent work.
Women's economic empowerment isn't just about jobs, financial services, property ownership and legal rights, though those are important. It's more than increasing the numbers of individually wealthy women. It's certainly about more than their charity and greater ability to help others. It's about more than increasing the numbers of women in the workplace, for many of those jobs may be dead-end, like hotel cleaners at a Tobago Sandals resort.
Strong, women-led, social movements, which successfully hold the state and political-economic elites accountable for our economic conditions, are the best example of women's economic empowerment. These movements recognise the unequal burdens and intersecting sources of subordination as well as the forms of dignity and value that characterise women's labour. They collectively challenge ideologies and institutions that sustain existing inequities in power and patterns of control over economic, natural and intellectual resources.
They compel investment in public infrastructure, for example in drinkable water and safe transportation, that affect women's home-based and waged-based work. Will the current focus on women's entrepreneurship advance such movement-building? Will it sustain commitment to cross-class solidarities among women, or a trickle-down form of feminism?
Indian feminist, Srilatha Batliwala, writes, "in keeping with the insidious dominance of the neo-liberal ideology and its consumerist core, we see the transition of empowerment out of the realm of societal and systemic change and into the individual–from a noun signifying shifts in social power to a verb signaling individual power, achievement, status." (OpenDemocracy 2007).
Yes, there should be more equal numbers of wealthy women to wealthy men. But, there should also be less extreme economic inequality between wealthy and poor. There should be access to justice for all regardless of their place in the economy. Such justice must include the legitimacy and influence of movements to end gender inequalities.
Given all that women's economic empowerment thus means, we wait to see what emphasis on women's entrepreneurship actually achieves.